[cary lichtenstein]

Besides the 7 courses that Mike Strantz was solely responsible, does anyone know those other courses where he was a "major factor" in the design?

[Tom_Doak]

Cary:

The only ones I'm sure of are Wild Dunes (he restored it after Hugo), and The Legends (Parkland) where he finished a few holes after I left the project.

[A.G._Crockett]

Here's the list given on the Strantz website:

"Two days after Hale Irwin won the U.S. Open, Mike Strantz was on a plane to Hilton Head’s Devil’s Elbow North, a new Fazio course under construction."

"Under the tutelage of Tom Fazio, Mike Strantz helped create many famous Fazio courses:  Wild Dunes, Wachesaw, Golden Eagle, Wade Hampton, Osprey Point, Lake Nona, Black Diamond."

"...Hurricane Hugo leveled the Isle of Palms and Wild Dunes’ Ocean Course in South Carolina.  Strantz helped load huge equipment on barges and then, for six months, single-handedly, shaped most of the reconstruction and remodeling work at Wild Dunes, with the blessings of Tom Fazio."

The link to his website is:

http://www.mikestrantzdesign.com/finalbio.html

[Anthony_Nysse]

So, Where is this Devil's Elbow North? I'm guessing that it never ended up getting developed.....?

Tony Nysse
Asst. Supt.
Long Cove Club
HHI, SC

[PThomas]

someone told me World Woods Pine Barrens

[A.G._Crockett]

someone told me World Woods Pine Barrens

I've heard this many times as well; don't know what that omission from the Strantz website might mean.  Poor editing?  Urban legend? Confidentiality agreement of some sort?

[Jfaspen]

Mike was responsible for the green complexes at the Heritage Course in Pawleys Island.  It's a decent course.. More could have been done with it, but worth your time to see.

jf

[Michael Whitaker]

Tony - Devil's Elbow is the North course at Moss Creek Plantation.

[Jay Flemma]

When I interviewed Mike, he told me he had never seen world woods, let alone worked on it.  Not astonishing that that Tobacco and WW look alike...bnoth he and fazio drew heavily from Pine Valley.

[Tom_Doak]

Interesting.  I didn't know Devil's Elbow north was the first course he worked on.  There was some cool shaping there, not the whole place, just little details ... we played it when I was working on Long Cove in 1981 and were impressed.  I also got to Wild Dunes that summer.

World Woods was after Caledonia, so I was positive that he hadn't worked on that.  Mike didn't build all that stuff for Mr. Fazio all by himself, you know.  He had a bunch of help, and I'm sure some of those guys learned how to build the bunkers the same way he had been doing them.

Jeffrey F:  Are you sure on your facts about The Heritage Club?  Were they rebuillt sometime after it opened, or did he supposedly do the original greens?  

The Heritage was Larry Young's previous course to The Legends (Heathland), so I know a little about its construction, and I never heard Mike's name there.  Larry was good friends with the owners of Wild Dunes, so he knew Mike Strantz through them, and that's how he wound up working on the Parkland course when I left ... and how he got the job at Caledonia, because the landowner had asked Larry to build the course for him, and Larry suggested they hire Mike.

I just can't believe Mike built anything of the original Heritage Club.  For one thing, if he had, I don't know why Larry wouldn't have hired him to build Heathland instead of me.  More importantly, nothing at The Heritage looked like Mike's work ... it just wasn't very cool at all.  

[Tim Gavrich]

I agree that the green complexes at Heritage seem a little watered-down to be Strantz's, but perhaps Larry Young asked him to do so?  I have no idea for sure, but it would not surprise me.  Heritage does bear similarities to both Caledonia and Wachesaw Plantation (which, it seems, we've agreed was touched by the hand of Strantz)--fairly narrow, due to  beautiful old trees, but with big, undulating greens (Heritage has the biggest of the three, I think; I'd love to see what happens when they're faster than shag carpeting).  A lot of greenside bunkers seem pulled-back from the edges of some greens at Heritage, but many of them are pretty nasty.  Also, when  I played there this summer, it seemed like they were--unfortunately--making the putting surfaces smaller, for maintenance reasons, no doubt.

[Jay Flemma]

I though caledonia was built on 1993, opened 1994 and Pine Barrens was 1990?

[Michael Whitaker]

Tom & Tim - I thought I remembered Dan Maples being associated with Heritage when it first opened. But, here's an excerpt from an article written by Shane Sharp of MyrtleBeachGolf.com that clears things up:

"We went to (golf course architect) Dan Maples about doing a routing, but he was really busy after the success he had with Marsh Harbor and Oyster Bay," says Danny Young, Larry's son and president of Barefoot and Legends Golf. "My dad just wanted him to take one look at this property to get him interested but he said he couldn't even make the site visits."

So the elder Young went at it alone, routing holes around protected wetlands and along the Waccamaw River, and sprinkling bunkers here and there. An interesting thing happened when he got to doing the greens, though. Taking a page out of Jack Nicklaus' mid-80s design manual, Young wrought some of the most severely slopping putting surfaces in the Southeast.

"If you think they are tough today, you should have seen them before," says Danny.

That is, before D. Young and maverick architect Mike Strantz redesigned the greens in the mid 90s. Strantz -- who'd established a relationship with the Youngs doing the Parkland Course at the Legends complex -- was laying out the Caledonia Golf and Fish Club just across the way. He and Young were chilling in a golf cart on Heritage's par-3 13th when they decided the course could use some tweaking.

"We just sat there and thought that something was missing," Young says. "We took the bunker out up front and lowered the green three feet. We also redid 18. It was a double green connected by about 12 feet of putting surface. If you were on one side and the pin on the other, you needed a wedge to get over."

 And while it may be hard to believe, Strantz and Young also toned down the locally famous green on the 365-yard par-4 12th. The putting surface measures 53 yards deep, 28 yards wide and features over five feet of elevation change spread among four quadrants. Before the alterations, a golfer putting from the back left would be visible from the chest up. These days, golfers' belts are readily recognizable.

Aside from the greens, most of Larry Young's original work remains in place. Heritage's 7,000-yard back tees play to a slope of 142, making it one of the toughest tests in the Grand Strand. The member's version of the course plays nearly 1,000 yards shorter, and creates a totally different golf experience.

[Brad Klein]

Since it was Strantz's shaping and hand work on the bunkers at Inverness in 1977 that so impressed Fazio that he hired him away from the maintenance staff, do the GCA revisionists now bow down and suddenly embrace that work as genius, too, after 25 years of reviling it?

[Michael Whitaker]

Brad - To quote Jimi Hendrix: "Once you're dead you're made for life."

[Tim Gavrich]

And while it may be hard to believe, Strantz and Young also toned down the locally famous green on the 365-yard par-4 12th. The putting surface measures 53 yards deep, 28 yards wide and features over five feet of elevation change spread among four quadrants. Before the alterations, a golfer putting from the back left would be visible from the chest up. These days, golfers' belts are readily recognizable.

I remember that hole quite well, and that green was incredible.  Does anyone have any pictures before and after the changing of that green?

Why does Maples get the design credit for Heritage if he said "no" to the project?

Also, I shot a relatively painless 74 from the tips at Heritage when I played there.  While I thought that some holes could get VERY interesting, if the player doesn't spray the ball over creation, some of the greens are nearly impossible to miss.  If you happen to have a decent lag-putting day, the sluggishness of the greens is exposed as a weakness and the course can be tamed.  Caledonia is much more difficult than Heritage; I would hope that in the future, the original contours are restored to a degree.  However, I really like it as is, and since it's 5 minutes from my family's condo at Pawleys Plantation, I hope to play it a few more times.  With two more courses in the top 100 Public (True Blue, Caledonia), Pawleys Island is a nice place at which one can spend weeks lounging around.

[Kyle Harris]

Tim,

Is there such a thing as a painful 74?

[Mike_Trenham]

Tom Doak

Legends Parkland, what is yours, what is Larry's and what is Mike's?

I heard that you walked off the project when the routing of the fininishing holes on the two nines & #10 were changed to make room for the practice area and condos.

My reaction to the course was that the features looked hand made and that I thought it was weird that a course with such craftmanship did not have an achitect noted in the marketing materials.

[Tim Gavrich]

Tim,

Is there such a thing as a painful 74?

Not painful per se, but I've had much harder-fought 74s.  What I was saying was that I felt it was easier than the website would have you believe.  A 74 at Heritage, I think, would equate to a 76 at, say, Caledonia or Pawleys Plantation.

[Tom_Doak]

Okay, he rebuilt the greens at The Heritage, that makes a bit more sense to me.  Those original greens were just ridiculously big and silly.

Mike T:  Gil Hanse and I shaped about 7-8 holes on the Parkland course before Larry decided it wasn't big and bold enough.  We had been trying to be subtle, so we realized we had a problem.  We asked Larry to show us what he wanted, and he directed the shaping on the first hole himself, and we didn't like that, so we decided we ought to part ways ... I didn't see the point of working on the course if I was sure it wasn't going to be as good as the one I had built there three years earlier.  It didn't have very much to do with the routing, it had to do with the shaping.

The holes we built which exist in something like their original form were 7, 8, 12, 13, 15 and 16.  I don't know exactly where Larry stopped and Mike started.

A couple of the local guys who had been shaping the course with us stayed and then went on to be part of Mike Strantz's crew ... one of them has worked with Mike Young a bit, too.

P.S.  The newspaper story quoted above is a bit biased since it tells only Danny Young's side of The Heritage story.  His dad and Dan Maples got into a nasty lawsuit over who should own how much of Marsh Harbour, where they had been partners.  I believe that Larry wanted to use Dan's name for The Heritage because it had been successful for Marsh Harbour and Oyster Bay, and that was part of their settlement.

[Michael Whitaker]

...Larry wanted to use Dan's name for The Heritage because it had been successful for Marsh Harbour and Oyster Bay, and that was part of their settlement.

Dan Maples let Larry Young put his name on a course that he didn't design in order to get sole design credit for Marsh Harbour and Osyter Bay?

[Tom_Doak]

Michael:

Dan Maples had done the routing for The Heritage, so putting his name on the course wasn't a ruse.  The settlement was about how much money he should be paid for "his half" of Marsh Harbour and Oyster Bay; keeping his name on The Heritage was just an add-on, and I'm not even sure which side wanted that.

It was all a settlement so the details are probably privileged information, and I'm not trying to get into a libel suit about any of it, just noting that there was some stuff going on behind the scenes, just like there was on The Legends.

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